How to Conquer Inbox Clutter in Outlook

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Email is the primary communications method for most businesses. Managing it can be daunting. Emails and responses -- and let's not forget spam -- can clutter up your inbox and fill up your server space in no time. This article will help you Conquer the Clutter (for Outlook 2010).

Use the Clean Up command. In Outlook 2010, the Clean Up command is an easy way to clear out a large number of email messages quickly. Say you have several thousand unread emails in a folder. The Clean Up command can reduce the count by 35 percent in about four seconds.

When you click "Clean Up" on the Home tab, Outlook 2010 evaluates the contents of each message in a Conversation, or in all Conversations in a folder. If an earlier message in a Conversation is completely contained within one of the replies, that message is deleted. In a long Conversation, Clean Up can remove a significant number of redundant messages.

For best Outlook performance, Microsoft recommends keeping your Inbox to no more than 5,000 messages. This includes the messages in all the sub-folders you’ve created under the Inbox.

Delete messages and folders you no longer need (don't forget the Junk folder). The Junk E-mail folder can fill up with all sorts of items that were blocked by the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal tool. This tool runs locally on your computer and is updated regularly by Microsoft Windows Update.

Check this folder and delete all junk messages regularly. If you find messages that are not junk, just highlight the message, right-click on that message, then from the Junk menu, choose “Not Junk.” This will allow that sender’s messages to go to your Inbox from now on.

Manage your Sent Items folder. Every message you send gets copied to the Sent Items folder. You may want to keep about three months of sent items in this folder to refer back to (you can keep more or less as required). Delete the rest on a regular basis. You can also setup Archiving on this folder and it will transfer items older than “x” to a personal folder you create.

If you don’t see the Sync Issues folders, you may need to change your Outlook view. Choose the “Folder List” to show all of your Outlook folders. The other selections filter down to just their particular view. Items in these Sync Issues folders are copied here because at the time of the send, there was some kind of communication issue with the mail server. This could be due to a weak VPN connection, server problem, network issue, etc.

Check these folders. Items in these folders indicate some kind of message delivery problem. It’s a good place to look when you’re missing a message in one of your regular folders. If you look through these and determine they are no longer needed, you can delete them. If you find messages you want to retain just move them to the correct location.

Be deliberate in what you delete. What you choose to cleanup and delete is entirely up to you. Some email may need to be kept due to regulatory requirements, legal discovery hold, business continuity or company retention policies. Deleting those messages that you can helps your Outlook search work faster, reduces the company backup storage space needed, and saves you time.

About This Article

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 9 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has also been viewed 7,553 times.